Slumber
noun, verb ·Moderate ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 A very light state of sleep, almost awake.
"Fast asleep? It is no matter; / Enjoy the honey-heavy dew of slumber."
- 2 a dormant or quiescent state wordnet
- 3 A very light state of sleep, almost awake.; A very heavy state of sleep. broadly
- 4 a natural and periodic state of rest during which consciousness of the world is suspended wordnet
- 5 A state of ignorance or inaction. figuratively
"Marcel Duchamp's urinal and readymades seemed in the beginning to be insider jokes or jokelike paradoxes meant to awaken people from their aesthetic slumbers."
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- 6 The snooze button on an alarm clock. rare
- 1 To be in a very light state of sleep, almost awake. intransitive
"He that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep."
- 2 be asleep wordnet
- 3 To be inactive or negligent. intransitive
- 4 To lay to sleep. obsolete, transitive
"slumber his conscience"
- 5 To stun; to stupefy. obsolete, transitive
"Then vp he tooke the slombred sencelesse corse."
Antonyms
All antonymsExample
More examples"He fell into a slumber inadvertently."
Etymology
From Middle English slombren, slomren, frequentative of Middle English slummen, slumen (“to doze”), probably from Middle English slume (“slumber”), from Old English slūma, from Proto-Germanic *slūm- (“slack, loose, limp, flabby”), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)lew- (“loose, limp, flabby”). Cognate with West Frisian slommerje, slûmerje (“to slumber”), Dutch sluimeren (“to slumber”), German schlummern (“to slumber, doze”), Swedish slummer (“to slumber”). By surface analysis, sloom + -er.
Related phrases
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.